I am not perfect and have many struggles. One key struggle though is envy. Being disabled, there are limits to what I can do, places I can go, and things I can experience. Social media does not help much with those things because social media, as many of you know, is all about people saying through posts “Look at me! Look at what I’m doing and what’s going on in my life!”
My struggle with envy goes outside of social media and into the real world, even while I am walking on the streets. Most every day, I walk by bars and restaurants. I watch people laugh, smile, eat and have drinks, all while I think to myself, “What problems could they possibly have?”
Last week, I went to the first meeting of a new men’s group led by a friend from college. I was excited about going prior to arriving. Yet, when I came, my paranoia was ignited through misreading others socially and I then truly hit a breaking point and chose to leave when everyone was incessantly talking about their jobs. I left early, thinking to myself, “I have limits and I cannot take stuff like that.”
While that night ended up “heading south” rather fast, I did have a good weekend with friends from church and this week has been rather good thus far. I am writing all of this, however, to say one thing.
Some of us may envy one particular person, but I believe many, myself included, covet after so many people and what they have that we make all of those people into an entity that cannot be broken, a “Facebook superman” or “superwoman.”
Yet, in reality, no one is “unbreakable” because no one is “truly whole.” Each and every person on social media and in the world has something or has been somewhere, done something that the other hasn’t. In conclusion, we are all “broken.”
And there is only one who can make us whole and put us together with others in His body. His name is Jesus.
In a world that is all about “me! me! me!” I believe the Devil wants us to envy, and that He wants us to linger in that pit and never come out. Now, more than ever, it is important for us all to realize that each and every one of us were not made to be “self-fulfilled” but we were made, as Matt Chandler says, to “glorify God.”
Until Next Time,
Jacobo
The Adventures of A Warrior 